Staying Focused

Hello, if you're anything like me... you're probably here because there's something else you should be doing right now but aren't. Yes, procrastination is a fickle bitch, however, it led me to think about issues I have had lately with my own focus. I'm not a productivity guru or anything, just someone trying to get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper, so take what I say here with a grain of salt.

Let's begin...

I recently picked up a book called "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains", link is here, also you should be using smile.amazon to buy things so you donate to a good cause. Anywho, this book brought up a lot of good points about how we learn in this digital age, mainly around how we focus on a lot of things and how we can't seem to focus on one thing at a time.

I had been feeling like I had some kind of 'brain fog', as in, I felt like I couldn't really process any new information. I was taking courses and watching how-to videos on youtube, reading books, etc. None of it was sticking, I panicked because that's an awful feeling to have, that your brain is all of a sudden feeling like an impenetrable wall. Someone on Reddit recommended this book to me because it helped them with the same issues.

What it boils down to, and the point of my post here is we are in an age like no other, you used to have to sit down with 20 some odd books to find the right passage for one line in a single term paper in a history class. Now that one line is just a simple google search away. Your brain is going 1000 mph and intaking so much information in that it can't process one page at a time. That's what the issue is, sit down and try to read a single long page in a document about an issue, or a news article, a lot of times you'll resort to skimming the text and call it a day. Our brains are evolving in front of our eyes quicker than we can keep up.

So I urge you, and the point of this post is to slow down, don't feel like you have to learn it all at once. Sure everyone wants to be that 'hacker guy' who knows all the answers in the flip of a switch, but reality doesn't work like that at least at first. There will be a day when you'll know a lot of things about software development, it's inevitable. However, I implore you to focus and hone one thing at a time at first, don't feel like you have to learn Java and Javascript, or C and PHP, don't feel like you have to 'devopsify' all of your projects at first. Get the basics down and focus on one thing, otherwise, you'll end up knowing a little about a lot of things that don't really help you much in your developer job.